CNN: ‘Angry’ Obama announces IRS leader’s ouster after conservatives targeted

President Barack Obama vowed Wednesday to hold accountable those at the Internal Revenue Service involved in the targeting of conservative groups applying for federal tax-exempt status, beginning with the resignation of the agency’s acting commissioner who was aware of the practice.

In a brief statement delivered to reporters in the East Room of the White House, the president announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested — and accepted — the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller.

The president said the “misconduct” detailed in the IRS Inspector General’s report released Tuesday over the singling out of conservative groups is “inexcusable

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said.

“It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is, the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity.”

Miller was made aware of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups in May 2012, according to the IRS, while serving as deputy IRS commissioner. He did not tell Congress about it when he testified before an oversight committee in July despite being questioned on the issue. Miller was named acting IRS commissioner in November.

Obama pledged to work “hand in hand” with Congress as it investigates, and he vowed new safeguards will be put in place at the IRS so that “this doesn’t happen again.”

In an internal message to IRS employees obtained by CNN, Miller said he would be stepping down as commissioner in early June.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/politics/irs-conservative-targeting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Reason.com: On Benghazi, “What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?” A lot.

animated

It was one of Hillary Clinton’s most infamous utterances during her tenure as secretary of state: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The comment came at a Senate committee hearing on the attack in Benghazi, and it encapsulated the attitude that Barack Obama’s self-described “most transparent administration in history” has taken to actual transparency.

At issue was who knew what and when about the nature of the Benghazi incident. Was it a preplanned attack by terrorists or a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube? The question didn’t seem to matter to Clinton, who pushed the YouTube narrative, leading the way in placing blame for the violence on an American’s exercise of free speech. A little later in the same answer, she offered these thoughts about accountablity: “it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

When the attack was fresh, the story of a mob killing on a whim was embraced both by officials and their boosters in the media. (“It’s all about the video,” Chris Matthews told a Romney supporter last October. “Read a newspaper.”) Yet just three days after the assault, a report in The Independent suggested senior officials were becoming “increasingly convinced” the assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi had been “planned.” Last week’s hearingshelped drive home the fact that the YouTube video had nothing to do with the violence. A New York Timeseditorial published just last week managed to miss the point, denouncing the“Republican obsession” over Benghazi while neglecting to mention the deliberately misleading statements government officials had made about the nature of the attack.

The Sunday after the Benghazi assault, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the political talk-show circuit to push the narrative of a spontaneous protest. It’s now been revealed that the talking points she relied on had been edited several times to excise all reference to any terrorist connection. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney deflected concern about that by pointing out that Republicans knew about the process. But that’s not relevant. The issue is that the government decided to mislead the American people. Whether the revisions came from the CIA or the State Department, they sought to conceal facts from the public. And government officials didn’t lean on any supposed national security concern for that deception, merely the understanding that what the American people were informed of is what they ought to know.

This “move along, nothing to see” attitude is hardly new to the Obama administration. But this president and his apologists have wrapped themselves in “the truth” in a way few of his predecessors have, even while acting in a relentlessly untransparent manner. Obama promised his would be “the most transparent administration in history,” yet his administration has brought up more cases against leakers (six) than all his predecessors combined, a fact that came up in reporting on the government seizing two months’ worth of phone records from the Associated Press.

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Click below for the full article.

 

TCSM: Will government probe of AP phone records cost Eric Holder his job?

Speculation has begun in Washington over whether a massive Justice Department investigation of Associated Press phone records will end up costing Attorney General Eric Holder his job.

Mr. Holder is “a battered survivor of many controversies and this could be the one that finally convinces him or Obama that it is time to go,” the National Journal’s Jill Lawrence writes.

Esquire blogger Charles Pierce adds: “He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic.”

And Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy tweeted, “It is 8:42. The AP phone story broke at 7:50. Why is Eric Holder still attorney general.”

Of course, only the president knows for sure whether Holder will be forced to step down to help quiet the multiple controversies engulfing the administration, which also include its handling of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi and the IRS’s investigation of conservative political organizations. But the political stakes for the White House are high.

“The rule of three … means the president’s credibility is truly on the line right now,” NBC’s First Read observes.

Sacrificing Holder might be personally painful to the president. In his book “Kill or Capture” about President Obama’s national security team, Daniel Klaidman notes that Mr. Obama and Holder have become good friends since they met at a dinner party in 2004. And Holder’s wife, obstetrician Sharon Malone, is reportedly very close with first lady Michelle Obama.

Holder has long been controversial, especially with Republicans who voted in June 2012 to hold him in contempt of Congress, the first time a sitting attorney general has been in that position. The issue was Holder’s refusal to turn over certain documents in “Fast and Furious,” a botched federal gun sting operation that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexico, and which resulted in the death of a US federal agent.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0514/Will-government-probe-of-AP-phone-records-cost-Eric-Holder-his-job

The Week: Why did the Obama administration spy on the Associated Press?

The Justice Department, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, has been accused of spying on the Associated Press.

The Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice had secretly spied on AP reporters, obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records in what was most likely an attempt to crack down on internal leaks.

According to the AP, the Justice Department acquired records for more than 20 different phone lines associated with the news agency — including reporters’ cell, office, and home lines — that could affect more than 100 staffers. Calling the move a “massive and unprecedented intrusion,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt demanded that the DOJ explain why it had gone after the records. He also insisted that the government return the phone records and destroy all other copies of them.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters,” he said in a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news-gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP‘s news-gathering operations, and disclose information about AP‘s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

He also accused the government of violating the news agency’s First Amendment rights, saying, “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

The DOJ told the AP of the secret eavesdropping on Friday, though the department did not explain exactly why it had gone after the records, dated April and May of 2012. According to the AP, the records detail incoming and outgoing calls on reporters’ personal phones, as well as office lines in New York, Hartford, Conn., and Washington, D.C. — including the agency’s line at the House of Representatives.

The AP suggested the snooping may have been an attempt to find out who within the government leaked information about a foiled Yemeni terror plot that ran in a May 2012 AP story.

More from the Associated Press on that:

The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP‘s source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” [Associated Press]

As the AP notes, prosecutors had previously asked the agency and its reporters for that information, though the news agency declined to cooperate. According to the AP, phone records for five reporters and one editor who worked on that story were among those collected by the DOJ.

In an interview with The Washington Post, a lawyer for the AP warned that the intrusion would have a chilling effect on the agency’s ability to effectively gather and report the news.

“This action is a dagger to the heart of AP‘s news-gathering activity,” lawyer David Schulz said. “Sources are not likely to talk to reporters who they know are being used as investigative tools by prosecutors. And that’s what’s happening here.”

Likewise, the American Civil Liberties Union strongly condemned the seizure as an “unacceptable abuse of power.”

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The Liberty Report Take:  This is exactly the kind of abuse that happens when we send politicians to Washington who won’t uphold the Constitution.  This is a consequence of Big Government ideology versus a limited federal government that adheres to the most sublime Constitution ever written by mankind.  Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Click below for the full article on The Week’s website.

http://theweek.com/article/index/244114/why-did-the-obama-administration-spy-on-the-associated-press

The Blaze: Obama Administration Under Siege From 3 Huge Scandals: Here’s Why It Could All Come Crashing Down

In just one week, President Barack Obama’s political machine has switched from endless campaign to survival mode. And for the first time in Obama’s presidency, the damage to his regime may be permanent.

Three revelations have come together like an avalanche. First, there was a Benghazi hearing that proved beyond any reasonable doubt that this administration is feckless, dishonest, and cravenly politicized. But in its aftermath on Friday, an executive branch information dump dropped another bombshell: the IRS does indeed target and intimidate conservative groups.

This appalling admission from a senior IRS official was obviously meant to slide into the news cycle and dissipate over the weekend. This unseemly public relations gambit has become a hallmark of the Obama approach to all issues, regardless of their importance to the nation. Deny or delay, spin and win.

And, to the discredit of our electorate, it has worked–until perhaps now.

As the country was still reeling from the gut-wrenching testimony of three Benghazi whistleblowers and the IRS mea culpa, yet another log was thrown onto the bonfire of the Obama administration’s credibility. Yesterday the Associated Press broke a news story that Obama’s Justice Department collected phone data on dozens of AP reporters as part of a national security leak investigation.

Such sweeping intrusion upon a news organization’s privacy–exposing all its sources and chilling all speech in the process–makes a mockery of the Constitution’s guarantee of not “abridging the freedom of speech.” We can now add the First Amendment to the butcher’s bill of Obama administration overreach and nascent autocracy.

These three scandals have encircled the Obama administration. They threaten to turn the President’s second term into an ongoing partisan dogfight as the GOP pushes for answers that could trigger investigations, resignations–yes, possibly even impeachment, depending on what is found.

Here’s a brief rundown of the current debacles facing Obama:

1) IRS as a Political Weapon

The IRS singled out and harassed conservative political groups, including during the election year of 2012. The mere mention of the IRS understandably sends a jolt of anxiety through most Americans, so the implications of this conduct for Tea Party and other conservative groups are obvious. This was the worst kind of dirty politics, and an affront to even the most basic trust in government.

While the IRS admitted this egregious conduct, already there have been lies peddled about the depth and scope of this malfeasance. At first we were told that the breaches were limited to low-level civil servants in a few field offices. But that was also false, as we now know Washington DC-based IRS officials were involved too.

The familiar script from Obama and his phalanx of public relations protectors in the White House–that the IRS abuses are not political, and only those who want answers have any political motivations–sounds increasingly obtuse, and pathetic. All the obfuscation on these issues come from the same direction, and benefit the same side of the political aisle.

And ultimately, incompetence and ignorance are poor excuses for a chief executive. The president can only claim he didn’t know what his agencies were up to so many times before someone asks the President that all important question- what would you say, you do here?

2) Frontal Assault on the First Amendment

If a free press is the foundation upon which representative government is built, the Obama administration has allowed the Department of Justice to take a sledgehammer to it. The wholesale investigation of a major news outlet like the Associated Press undermines the intent and spirit of laws meant to promote the discourse necessary for democracy.

And this sets a very dangerous precedent. Unknown to much of the public, there is no special exception for the media to publish classified government information, nor are there hard-and-fast statutory constraints on calling members of the press to divulge their sources under pressure of subpoena. If Obama’s DOJ can do this once, there is no reason they can’t make it standard operating procedure. That would mean bye-bye, fourth estate.

Until now, the federal government has been generally aware of the tension that exists between national security and the First Amendment. Not this administration. Leakers, at least the ones not authorized from the White House itself, are punished severely.

At this early stage, it seems likely the Obama administration recognized that, despite its loud proclamations of outrage, no arrests have been made over the string of national security leaks over the past two years. In order to make it look like they take all leaks seriously, and to send a message to any prospective whistleblowers, Obama officials probably decided to go all in after one unauthorized leaker without the benefit of White House connections. That frenzied effort may have led to the unprecedented, secret seizure of Associated Press records.

3) Benghazi Lies Laid Bare

While the audacity of hyper-partisanship from Obama is jarring, it’s not shocking. So much about this administration, and for so long, has been venal, petty, and undignified. The most recent iteration of the Benghazi hearings solidified those feelings and left even the most ardent administration supporter defending the indefensible. But many questions remain:

Who made up the story about the YouTube video? Was Hillary Clinton incapable of calling her own employees to find out what happened? Where was President Obama during the 8-hour attack? What is being done to bring the attackers to justice? These are just some of the unknowns that require continued investigation despite the administration’s efforts at stonewalling.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/obama-administration-under-siege-from-3-huge-scandals-heres-why-it-could-all-come-crashing-down/

Reason.com: Free Markets Are More Important Than Safety Regulations

California and Texas officials have been having an ongoing tit-for-tat over which of the nation’s two mega-states is the better place to live and do business – something that has become a proxy issue for the broader philosophical debate over the proper size and scope of government.

In California, Democrats control every state constitutional office and have an iron grip on the Legislature, where they always propose new regulations and seek new ways to secure additional tax revenues.  In Texas, Republicans are dominant and Gov. Rick Perry has spent time in San Diego and other California cities luring businesses to the Lone Star State, which prides itself on a low tax burden and more manageable level of regulation.

The rhetoric often has gotten silly, especially given that both states are part of a nation that is highly taxed and highly regulated. Most of the differences are around the margins. Nevertheless, Democrats here pretend that businesses aren’t leaving and that the common critiques of $150,000 pension deals for public employees, sky-high tax rates and punitive bureaucracies are a right-wing, Koch-funded plot to turn the Golden State into Bangladesh.

The latest flare-up centers on a Sacramento Bee cartoon in which Perry says “Business is booming in Texas.” It then shows the recent, tragic fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas. Cartoons are rarely subtle, and the message here is that Texas’lower-regulation climate is responsible for a blast that killed 14 people and injured 200. Gov. Perry penned an angry letter to the editor.

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Click below for the full article.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/10/free-markets-are-more-important-than-saf

Yahoo News: After Benghazi, IRS tea party probe: Govt seized AP phone records

Exactly ten days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, the Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The latest revelations are sure to pour fuel on the fire of Republican-driven Richard Nixon comparisons. They come in the wake of revelations that the IRS may have improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative, tea party-linked groups. This might, in order words, not be a great time to announce a groundbreaking trip to China.

And the news threatens to pile fresh political woes on a second term already burdened by a painful gun-control defeat, a seemingly stalled economic agenda, and Republican rage at the botched response to the Sept. 12, 2012 terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

The revelations that the Justice Department may have sought AP phone records drew an angry response from Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s office. “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

And Laura Murphy, a top American Civil Liberties Union official in Washington, D.C., condemned “unwarranted surveillance” of the press and urged Holder to explain what transpired “so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again.”

Holder was expected to face questions on the issue when he appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia did not answer a question from Yahoo News on whether other news outlets had been targeted. The spokesman, Bill Miller, did not confirm the AP allegations, but insisted in a statement that “we take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations.”

Pruitt, in his letter to Holder, fiercely disagreed.

 

He said that the Justice Department had obtained telephone records for more than 20 separate phone lines assigned to the AP — the world’s largest wire service — and its journalists. The records cover a two-month span in early 2012 and cover phones lines for AP in New York City, Washington D.C., Hartford, Conn., and one line at the AP workspace in the House of Representatives.

“This action was taken without advance notice to AP or to any of the affected journalists, and even after the fact no notice has been sent to individual journalists whose home phones and cell phone records were seized by the Department,” Pruitt wrote.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt wrote. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

Pruitt called it “particularly troubling” that the Justice Department “undertook this unprecedented step without providing any notice to the AP, and without taking any steps to narrow the scope of its subpoenas to matters actually relevant to an ongoing investigation.”

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The Liberty Report Take: As posted earlier today, this is yet another move to transition the United States away from the consitution into a Big Brother form of government.

Click below for the full article.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/benghazi-irs-tea-party-probe-govt-seized-ap-221531096.html

Reason.com: IRS Admits Targeting Tea Party Groups During 2012 Elections (Updated with Actual Letters)

"Oh, boo yourself!"

In early 2012 several conservative groups of the Tea Party persuasion reported they were getting strange letters from the IRS demanding more information than they believed typical for 501(c)4 non-profit political groups — sometimes hundreds of pages more. Fox News reportedback then:

In letters sent from IRS offices in Cincinnati earlier this month, chapters including the Waco (Texas) Tea Party and the Ohio Liberty Council were asked to provide a list of donors, identify volunteers, financial support for and relationships with political candidates and parties, and even printed copies of their Facebook pages.

“Some of what they (the IRS) asked was reasonable, but there were some requests on there that were strange,” Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party told FoxNews.com. “It makes you wonder if they do this to groups like ACORN or other left-leaning groups.”

Were they really being targeted or were they just being paranoid about tiresome, exhaustive but actually common IRS bureaucratic meddling? Turns out they were being targeted, after all. Today, an IRS head admitted as much and apologized. Via the Associated Press:

Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, said organizations that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews.

Lerner said the practice, initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati, was wrong and she apologized while speaking at a conference in Washington.

I’m sure a stern memo was sent out to all involved.

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The Liberty Report Take: While one can certainly question the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision essentially allowing groups to declare themselves a charity to receive tax-exempt status while still having their basic function to support specific parties and candidates through media advertisements, the fact remains that all political parties are involved in this practice.  Liberals like Bill Burton and Neo-Cons like Karl Rove have practived this as have super-pacs.  But to single out people with a specific political leaning is beyond wrong and is yet another move to a Police State, Big Government, Big Brother USA.

Click the link below for the full article including actual letters.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/10/irs-admits-targeting-tea-party-groups-du